Still picking away on the Kat shawl. I hope after I get these two journal article rewrites done, I can go home and work on it for a goodly block of time.

I also am almost to the heel flap on the first of the "that 70s socks," thanks to reading the chapters for this book review. (Did I say I was earning $175 for that? And yesterday, I caught an error, a humongous glaring horrible error that would have confused students and made their future ecology professors weep in frustration and impotent rage, because as all educators know, the real problem is not getting students to learn what they don't know, it's getting them to unlearn what they learned wrong at some point.)

I also did the necessary shopping for the week yesterday, including obtaining materials for the bird-bags. I'm not sure if I'll be able to work up the motivation to make them this weekend, however.

I also bought, on sale, four yards of a thin cotton sleepwear print. It is pink, and has pastel sheep leaping over fences. (Of course, I had to have it). Once I finish the bird-bags, I'm going to dig through my patterns and see if I have a summer shorty-pajama pattern to use it for. Or possibly a nightgown, if I have a pattern for one. Or maybe just a pair of pajama bottoms, and then buy a tank top and applique one of the sheep on that.

I haven't been terribly motivated to work hard on anything the past few days. I think it's partly allergies, and partly the fact that it's been a long hard slog since January, and I'm just tired, and a three-day weekend isn't enough to fix that.

I've also found myself getting drawn into various books. My book club is reading "The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency" (which I have already read, but which I enjoyed enough to want to read again). I'm also reading a mystery by Brandon Gill (one of his Peter McGarr mysteries), "Death of an Irish Consul." I'm finding the series less appealing than I did when I first
started it because......read at the bottom of the entry, in the magenta type*
(to avoid spoiling it for anyone who may be reading the series)

I also am reading "The Invention of Clouds", which is a history of meteorology and discusses Luke Howard's contribution to the naming of clouds. And reading, or trying to, an interminable book on the history of the Indo-European languages. I stick with that one because it's a topic that fascinates me, even though the book I have assumes a background in anthropology that I lack, so I'm often a bit confused by the whole thing.

I feel not unlike Toft in "Moominvalley in November", where he goes up to the room where he thinks the Ancestor is, to read the book about nummulites (I'm guessing it's a book about early life on earth, from some of the words used) and he doesn't really understand it, but in his mind, the nummulites and graptolites take on their own personalities and their own lives - well, that's how I am with the Alans and the Samartians and the Hurrians.

And I took down one of my Trollope novels off the shelf, and made the mistake of reading a few pages and getting hooked in. It's one of his earlier novels, called "La Vendée" and it is set in a part of France that was trying to resist the excesses of the French Revolution and allow the restoration of a seigneurage system that seemed to work for them.

It's described as one of Trollope's "lesser" novels, an early effort that didn't go as well as it might have, partly because he had a more acute ear and eye for his own time than for the 100-years-gone past. But, as I love Trollope and also love historicals, I consider that even a middling effort of his will be better than much of what I have read by modern authors. (And at least, in a Trollope historical, I won't find myself unpleasantly surprised by the insertion of a graphic sex scene between the two lead characters, as I so often seem to be in modern historicals).





*(If you're reading "Death of an Irish Sinner" or are reading the McGarr series in sequence, CLICK AWAY NOW!!!)








one of the very likeable and sympathetic characters in McGarr's family (OK, that makes it less of a spoiler) gets killed quite brutally, and (IMHO) needlessly, at the end of the book. So now, every time I pick up one of these, I look at the original publication date to see if it's one with the character or without. I hate it - hate it deeply - when an author of a series kills off a likeable and not-deserving-of-death character. It's too much of the real world intruding.